


maybe i'll see you in another life (if this one wasn't enough)

by inthearmsoftheocean



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2017-12-07
Packaged: 2019-02-11 21:31:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12944361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inthearmsoftheocean/pseuds/inthearmsoftheocean
Summary: "Where's Raymond and Mick?"If he were ever questioned about it, it couldn't be said that Rip panicked in that moment or acted without thinking. In the end, he couldn't even say he regretted his words."Ray was hit. Mick is carrying him back to the Waverider."A look at what might have happened if Mick had stayed behind at the Oculus instead of Leonard.





	maybe i'll see you in another life (if this one wasn't enough)

**Author's Note:**

> If you're a big fan of Rip Hunter, this probably isn't the fic for you.

"We're leaving!" Rip announced, racing toward Leonard and Sara as they stood guard at the entrance to the Oculus. "We've got less than two minutes before it blows."

In all ways but one, their plan had gone off without a hitch. Jax landed beside him, leaving all members of the team accounted for. Nearly every hurdle had been cleared and their objective had been completed — the Oculus was rigged to self-destruct and take all of the corrupted Time Masters along with it. No longer would his own actions or those of anyone else on Earth be controlled by those he had once trusted, those who had proven to be cruel enough to let countless innocent people die, including his own family, at the hands of Vandal Savage.

If it weren't for the small matter of costing the life of one of their own, Rip might have called it the Legends' first successful venture.

It didn't matter. It was too late to turn back now.

Leonard, however, hesitated at Rip's order. He used the opportunity to shoot another faceless guard of the Vanishing Point as they approached and gave himself enough time to question the whereabouts of the missing members of the team, just as Rip hoped he wouldn't do.

"Where's Raymond and Mick?"

Rip's fingers brushed against his trousers where the shrunken Ray Palmer lay unconscious, knocked out by a heat gun in the process of Mick's immolation. He opened his mouth to tell Leonard as much, but when he glanced back at the criminal, the words died on his lips.

Leonard Snart was, in his own indisputable way, a genius. An expert thief, a master tactician, an escape artist and, not least importantly, Captain Cold. Rip had deliberately searched for people that wouldn't make much of an impact on the timeline when he had crafted his ragtag team, but there was no denying that the world would be irrevocably changed without him. Whether it was for better or worse was entirely subjective and varied from person to person, but Leonard left an impact wherever he went all the same. He also knew that Leonard could prove to be incredibly valuable when it came to facing Savage, and that he needed as much help as he could possibly get now that time was running out to save Miranda and Jonas.

Mick, on the other hand? Mick was a thug, a mindless brute who only mattered to anyone outside of the Central City justice system because of a heat gun that Snart had obtained for him. He was lucky, not special. It was no secret that Rip had always regretted bringing along a violent, unpredictable pyromaniac on his mission in the first place, but as he had told Mick before, there was no convincing Leonard, a man he actually needed, to join without him, and thus he had been forced to take on his partner as well. It was only that close relationship that made Mick useful or worthwhile in any way.

In short, Mick Rory was expendable. Leonard Snart was not.

The thought occurred to him in the split-second pause while Leonard stared him down, demanding an explanation.

If he were ever questioned about it, it couldn't be said that Rip panicked in that moment or acted without thinking. In the end, he couldn't even say he regretted his words.

"Ray was hit. Mick is carrying him back to the Waverider," Rip answered, hurrying toward the ship as he spoke. The rest, Leonard included, slowly followed, even if it was only to hear what he said as he moved away. "He's right behind us, he said to go ahead and he would meet us in a moment."

Leonard stopped in his tracks, his cold gun still raised and prepared to fire. His expression was indecipherable behind his dark goggles and his layers of practiced apathy. For a moment Rip was afraid that the man far more well-versed in deception could tell he was lying, that he would run back and find Mick for himself, but as Sara and Jax dashed toward the ship, Leonard joined them without a word. 

Rip stayed behind and made sure the rest of them board the Waverider safely, just as he knew a captain should. 

Something sank low in his chest, but he refused to acknowledge it as guilt or as anything else, for that matter. He wouldn't waste another thought on a man he hated when the lives of his family were still at stake, nor would he rob him of perhaps the only selfless act he had ever committed in his entire life.

With a last look back, he followed.

-

"Knew we'd want a front row seat for this one."

Sara grinned at Leonard, both of them leaning over the small ledge that jutted from the only window on the Waverider. Neither turned around as they heard the rest of the team enter the room, with Rip hastily giving orders to Gideon and taking off just as the fireworks started.

Leonard didn't blink once as he watched the Oculus erupt in a fiery blaze, taking the rest of the Vanishing Point and the bastards that had used his life as their own personal plaything down with it.

It was a magnificent thing to behold, even for someone who personally preferred ice.

"This must be like Christmas for Mick," Leonard said, something dangerously close to fondness in his tone.

He found it odd that Mick wasn't wedged between the two of them and enjoying the show, so he turned to the woman beside him, then to the small group gathered behind. His head count left them short two people.

"Where is he?" He asked Sara.

She cocked her head. "You haven't seen him?"

"No. Must be with Ray in the med bay."

Despite the brief anxiety Leonard had felt at not finding Mick on the bridge with everyone else, he was quietly charmed by the fact that his partner had perhaps missed the greatest explosion of all of space and time just so he could save a man he claimed to despise. It was yet another sign of a massive personal growth Leonard had noticed since Mick had joined the team, and though he wouldn't say so to anyone else, he was incredibly proud of him. Once their mission was completed, they would return to 2016 as men changed for the better. It was unclear as to whether either of them planned to give up the only career they had ever known, but it wouldn't be easy for Leonard to return to the life of a petty criminal after saving the entire human race.

Whatever their uncertain future held for them, Mick served as a constant, a reassuring presence that was as loyal as he was brave and intelligent, even if it took a certain angle and years of things that no one else had been lucky enough to witness to see the best in him. 

Savage was still alive, of course, which meant their ultimate goal was still far from accomplished and that those dreams and aspirations were still just figments of his imagination for the time being, but to know that his thoughts and his actions were his own for perhaps the first time in his entire life had its own way of taking a weight off of his shoulders that he never knew he had. 

"I'll go check on them," he said, patting Sara on the shoulder and curling the other beneath his chin while he walking past the captain's chair. "Raymond can't be hurt too badly or we would've heard all about it from Gideon by now."

"Tell Mick we'll find something to blow up back home to make it up to him," Sara replied, giving a look of mock sympathy that was betrayed by clear affection and amusement in her eyes.

"You give him an inch, he'll take a mile," Leonard warned. "We never did find out why Star City was a burning wasteland in thirty years, did we? I think this might be a clue."

Sara's laughter followed him down the corridor.

"I know you're worried about Raymond, Mick, but I'm sure Gideon has it - " Leonard began as he swung around a corner into the med bay, stopping mid-sentence when he found it empty.

His expression hardened as he tried to push down the suffocating feeling that something had just gone terribly, terribly wrong.

_Alexa._

He turned on the heel of his boot and sprinted back down the hall.

"Rip," he called out as he entered the bridge once more, his hand falling to the cold gun at his hip out of nervous habit, "where are they?"

What he found was the beloved captain crouched on the floor, standing over a miniature Ray Palmer and looking for the switch to restore his suit, and the man inside, to full size.

Leonard's blood ran cold.

Rip looked up, evidently awaiting the question and the reaction that would follow once he learned the answer.

"Mick elected to stay behind," he explained calmly. "Someone had to be present to destroy the Oculus. He chose to take Ray's place."

"You lied to me," Leonard said, his dry throat barely producing a whisper.

"I knew you wouldn't come if I told you the truth." Rip avoided Leonard's gaze as he spoke, finally managing to find the button on Ray's chest and bring him back to normal just as he began to wake from his unconsciousness. "I won't apologize, Mr. Snart. I know you cared for your friend, but there was no sense in losing both of you when Mick had made the decision to sacrifice himself."

Sara had the decency of looking horrified, berating and yelling at Rip from across the room, but Leonard couldn't hear a word of it over the deafening white noise in his ears, blocking out almost all sound and thought aside from a single name.

The entire world had shifted and would never be right again, not without Mick. 

What made it all the more gruesome was the fact that Rip had already lied to him once and Leonard had no doubt that he could have been lying again. 

Perhaps Mick hadn't chosen to stay behind. 

Perhaps Rip had abandoned him instead, leaving him to die.

_Not just Rip. You abandoned Mick too._

It would have been easy to say that something unnatural had possessed him and forced him to take his cold gun from its holster, that he had been overcome by insanity and driven by grief, but he would never deny himself the perverse satisfaction of taking credit for the death of Rip Hunter.

"Leonard!" Sara screamed, loud enough to pierce through the unnerving silence in his ears as she ran to Rip's side.

It was no use. The captain was dead before he hit the floor, impaled on an icicle straight through his chest. The fingers that he tried to shield himself with were already black from frostbite.

To Leonard's despair, watching the life leave Rip's eyes didn't cause Mick to walk through the door and ask what all of the chaos was about.

He backed up against the nearest wall, keeping his gun drawn.

"Anyone takes another step and they'll end up just like Rip," he snarled in a voice once solely reserved for robberies gone belly up that he feared he wouldn't escape from with his life. 

He looked across the room and met the eyes of the people he had come to know, possibly even love — the ones that had let Mick die.

Sara, with fresh tears leaving tracks down her cheeks as she held Rip's lifeless body in her lap, stared back.

"Leonard, you don't have to do this," she said, and it was only then that Leonard realized that Sara, no matter how devastated she was by the loss of the captain, was not attacking or attempting to disarm him even as he threatened the lives of everyone aboard the ship.

Leonard paused with his finger still on the trigger. He looked around desperately and found Jax, Stein and Ray giving him the same look, not ones of fear but of condolence and regret and sorrow.

His knees buckled under the crushing weight of loss and the gun fell from his hands.

"We have to go back," he choked out.

"I'm afraid that's not possible," Gideon chimed in. "Returning to events that you participated in, such as Mr. Rory's death, would cause a temporal vortex and - "

"Not there," Leonard snapped. "I want to go back."

-

"We could steal the Mona Lisa straight off Da Vinci's easel, snatch the Hope Diamond before it was discovered," Leonard explained, fantasizing aloud of all of the riches he and Mick could get their hands on should they join Rip Hunter and his doomed quest to save the world. "This is everything we got into thieving for in the first place. More than everything."

Mick turned back to Len, surrender already written in his features. How could he not give in? Wherever Len went, Mick followed. The year they had spent apart while he was in Keystone City recovering from his burns had been almost unbearable, and even prison with Len had always been better than being a free man without him. There was no chance that he'd let Len go on a suicide mission while he waited in Central City alone, wondering if they would ever see each other again.

"You want me in, I'm in," he said, as if Len could have possibly not known that. "But I'm not gonna be anyone's hero."

His smirk told Mick all he needed to know about Len's personal opinion of heroism.

A knock at the door of the warehouse caused them both to freeze before either of them could say another word, looking at each other in surprise and confusion. No one knew where the two of them were hiding out, not even the time traveler or the crew they had recently organized for their next heist.

"I'll get it," Len volunteered. "You stay here."

Mick was silent as he watched Len approach the door, stepping outside into the darkness and closing it behind him. 

At the sound of the cold gun firing and a body hitting the ground with a dull thud, Mick grabbed his own gun on instinct.

"It's fine!" Len's voice called back before Mick could make it to the door. "Just some nosy wannabe do-gooder, I'll get rid of him."

"Are you sure?" Mick yelled from inside.

"I've got it." There was a strain in Len's voice, and if Mick didn't know any better, perhaps even a touch of emotion, but he wasn't going to mention it and face whatever wrath it would bring to question Len about his feelings. "I've hidden more than a few bodies, Mick. I can handle this on my own."

With a quiet grunt, Mick reluctantly returned to his work, putting a few finishing touches on his gun. 

Nearly half an hour passed, and just as Mick was about to go out searching for him, Len finally walked into the warehouse again, looking around seemingly in a daze before he set his sights on his partner. 

Mick glanced up from the power drill in his hand and frowned.

"Where did you get the new jacket?" He asked about the leather garment he had never seen before. "Weren't you wearing the blue fuzzy one when you left?"

Len approached instead of answering his question, cupping Mick's face and marveling at him as if he hadn't seen him in years.

"Mick," he whispered, dragging gloved fingers along his jawline and his shaved head. "Mick, you're all right."

His smile nearly split his face, and he pulled Mick down to kiss him deeply. Mick, while never one to complain about kissing Leonard Snart, was too puzzled to truly enjoy it.

"Of course I'm all right," he pointed out, sounding slightly resentful even as he rested his hands on the small of Len's back and pulled him closer. "You've been acting funny ever since we met the Englishman. I don't know what the hell is going on, but are you sure we should go with - "

"No," Len interrupted too quickly, shaking his head to further drive home his point. "I've had a little time to think and we shouldn't go. It's a bad idea."

Mick narrowed his eyes, absolutely bewildered. "But... But you were the one who was just talking about the Mona Lisa and how easy it would be to steal in the past."

Len breathed out, still brushing his fingers against Mick's face as if he couldn't believe he was real and needed to prove it to himself through touch.

"None of that matters," he said quietly. "I don't care about what we could steal or trying to be a hero. Maybe I'm selfish, but I have what I need right here and right now. The rest of it can burn."

Mick scowled. "That's the cheesiest thing you've ever said. Who are you and what have you done with Leonard Snart?"

"I am Leonard Snart," he replied somberly. "In the future, you sacrifice your life to save everyone and I lose you forever, so I came to warn you not to go. I killed my past self in cold blood just so I could have you back."

Mick stared for a few long, tense seconds before he was suddenly doubled over, howling with laughter. 

"Fine, fine, I won't go," he agreed once he caught his breath, stripping his gloves off so he could wipe his eyes. "But if you want a believable story, next time just say that I got in a fight with a bunch of pirates or that you killed me for looking at Marilyn Monroe for too long or something."

Leonard's soft smile returned, one that Mick still found strange but was getting used to faster than he might have expected.

"You think I'd leave you alone with Marilyn Monroe?" He asked, poking Mick's chest. "She had a thing for brilliant men, you know. She'd be all over you in a heartbeat and she would find out the hard way that I don't share."

"Good thing we never went time traveling, then."

Mick grabbed two more beers from the bridge for an informal toast.

"To telling the Englishman to go screw himself," Mick said, winding an arm around Len's waist.

Len gave him that look again, the one that almost cracked his hard exterior and made him feel warm and mushy inside in a way that he would've hated if it were anyone else in the world. 

"To 2016," he agreed, clinking the bottles together.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my second story told in three parts inspired by a throwaway comment in a group chat, so I should probably start a series at this rate. 
> 
> Thank you to Sam (@paranormaltwink on tumblr), Gavin (@atranskid) and Rachel (@jewishraypalmer) for all serving as inspiration for this story.


End file.
